The Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT
is an interdisciplinary laboratory with faculty from seven academic departments
and students from even more departments. With over ninety faculty, senior
and principal research scientists, and more than 400 supported graduate
students our lab is the largest and most intellectually diverse laboratory
at MIT. Along with that diversity however is a strong commitment to collaborative
research. Many faculty have joint projects within CSAIL and with other
groups around the campus. Additionally we have a number of cross cutting
projects and centers within CSAIL, such as our T-Party project, our joint
lab with Nokia Research, the Center for Information Security and Privacy,
the Center for Robotics, and the Center for Biological and Computational
Learning.

In order to facilitate our operations we organize the laboratory into
four groupings which roughly correspond to both our spatial organization
within the Dreyfoos and Gates towers of the Ray and Maria Stata Center,
and which correspond very roughly to the areas of closest collaboration.
However these are only very rough groupings and our lab wide initiatives
and smaller research collaborations easily span them. The following brief
descriptions do not do any of these groupings full justice but at least
point in the directions of the research carried out within them.

Perception and Learning includes work on the
sorts of things that all people manage to do effortlessly, both emulating
those abilities, and simulating their appearance.

Physical, Biological and Social Systems might
also be called complex adaptive systems, and covers work from robotics,
to molecular biology, to semantic systems, to computational models of
politics.

Systems covers all aspects of the building
of both hardware and software computational systems, including computer
architecture and networks.

Theory looks at the fundamental mathematical
underpinnings of all aspects of computer science and artificial intelligence.

The set of abstracts which are presented here represent many of the
research projects that are going on within CSAIL. They are organized along
the lines of the major research groupings. They illustrate the wide variety
of work that goes on at CSAIL and the difficulty in classifying them into
any ontology illustrates the extent to which the research cuts across
any set of easily defined boundaries.